WHAT BROUGHT HIM?

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 1, 1881

WHAT BROUGHT HIM?

the communicating spirit is or has been en rapport.

WHAT BROUGHT HIM?

I was sitting one Sabbath morning, with a newspaper in one hand, feeling really miserable. My wife and eldest boy had gone to church. I heard the other children talking, and the question fell upon my ear, “Horace, when you are a man, which will you do—go to church like mamma does, or stay at home always and read the newspaper?”

“I,” said Horace, eight years old, with great emphasis on the I, “shall do neither. I shall not go to church and I shall not sit about home. I shall have a big horse; and Jamie Lincoln and I will go a riding, and go right away and have lots of fun.”

That child’s words set me thinking. I saw my own boy in company with others of the loosest and most unprincipled of men, and perhaps women, spending his time in a way which would break his mother’s heart. I thought of my white-haired old father and my placid, amiable mother, both gone; saw them quietly walking side by side to church in the old country town, and we children following. I could not sit another five minutes. Up I rose, and putting on hat and coat, went to the church, and slipped into a pew in the rear, and, heard the sermon, or tried to hear it, for that boy’s speech had taken possession of my soul, and had filled it. My wife was astonished to see me waiting for her at the church door. “I thought I would come and meet you,” was all I said.—Messiah’s Herald.